Envy Quotes

I admired him more than anyone but I didn't wish him well. It was that I preferred him to me and wanted to be him. I coveted his talents, face, style. I wanted to wake up with them all transferred to me.

~ Hanif Kureishi

What's wrong with (Captain) Jack Aubrey?Everything, since he has a command and I have not.

~ Patrick O'brian

Millions upon millions will attain your ceremony, but don't think all of them are in a ceremonius mood.

~ Michael Bassey Johnson

Stretch an unwavering tenacity when facing bad to worse attitudes.

~ Angelica Hopes

Learn to love your haters, they are a wonderful source of inspiration.

~ Habeeb Akande

Envy yearns to find flaws.

~ Wayne Gerard Trotman

Envy is a buzz killer.~R. Alan Woods [2013]

~ R. Alan Woods

Insecure people put others down to raise themselves up.

~ Habeeb Akande

I am Envy, begotten of a chimney-sweeper and an oyster-wife. I cannot read, and therefore wish all books were burnt; I am lean with seeing others eat - O that there would come a famine through all the world, that all might die, and I live alone; then thou should'st see how fat I would be! But must thou sit and I stand? Come down, with a vengeance!

~ Christopher Marlowe

Once she was standing by her locker and her puka shells broke and scattered and she made a joke about it but he could tell she was upset. He wanted to buy her some more. He wanted to give her a million strands of little nesting polished shells, and tropical flowers and ice creams and lemonades and a pale blue surfboard to teach her to surf on and anything else she wanted. Instead he let his checkered Vans step on one of the rolling shells and crush it.

~ Francesca Lia Block

Gain fame, and the paparazzi or media waits and watches for them to slip, just to shame their name.

~ Anthony Liccione

The happiness of being envied is glamour.Being envied is a solitary form of reassurance. It depends precisely upon not sharing your experience with those who envy you. You are observed with interest but you do not observe with interest - if you do, you will become less enviable. In this respect the envied are like bureaucrats; the more impersonal they are, the greater the illusion (for themselves and for others) of their power. The power of the glamorous resides in their supposed happiness: the power of the bureaucrat in his supposed authority.

~ John Berger

Judgement is so often a thwarted, frustrated expression of envy.

~ Elizabeth Winder

Though I have said that I envy the normal man to the last drop of my bile, yet I should not care to be in his place such as he is now (though I shall not cease envying him). No, no; anyway the underground life is more advantageous. There, at any rate, one can … Oh, but even now I am lying! I am lying because I know myself that it is not underground that is better, but something different, quite different, for which I am thirsting, but which I cannot find! Damn underground!

~ Fyodor Dostoyevsky

Fortunate is he who does not carry envy as a companion.

~ Jalaluddin Rumi

When the same qualities which we admire in ourselves are seen in others, even though they be superior, maliciously lower and carp at them.

~ John Calvin

Blessed is he who has learned to admire but not envy, to follow but not imitate, to praise but not flatter, and to lead but not manipulate.

~ William Arthur Ward

If some talents were withheld, the Withholder knows why. He has done all things well.

~ Charles Haddon Spurgeon

And so when you see a man often wearing the robe of office, when you see one whose name is famous in the Forum, do not envy him; those things are bought at the price of life. They will waste all their years, in order that they may have one year reckoned by their name.

~ Seneca

Dominance can be a tempration to division. There are so many of us, we can afford to fight amongst ourselves.

~ Richard Brookhiser

Do not envy the rich, pity them. Matthew 19:24.

~ Felix Wantang

Before her angry impulses got the better of her, she admonished herself that she was born to win and that one did not win by throwing temper tantrums--at least not outside of one's own home, which could result in vicious, spurious rumors.

~ Anna Godbersen

One did not win by throwing temper tantrums.

~ Anna Godbersen

Pamela was beautiful, it was true, and I felt that submerged attraction to her that everyone felt for the beautiful.

~ Emma Cline

Envy isn’t always green; it’s often black and white! (On book reviews - from an article written in 2013)

~ Eric J. Gates

Why do we have this desire to tease the innocent? Is it envy?

~ Graham Greene

They'll either want to kill you, kiss you, or be you.

~ Suzanne Collins

Envy is the religion of the mediocre. It comforts them, it soothes their worries, and finally it rots their souls, allowing them to justify their meanness and their greed until they believe these to be virtues. Such people are convinced that the doors of heaven will be opened only to poor wretches like themselves who go through life without leaving any trace but their threadbare attempts to belittle others and to exclude - and destroy if possible - those who, by the simple fact of their existence, show up their own poorness of spirit, mind, and guts. Blessed be the one at whom the fools bark, because his soul will never belong to them.

~ Carlos Ruiz Zafón

There was no pleasure like being envied on a mass scale.

~ Anna Godbersen

If the grass is greener on the other side of the fence, you can bet the water bill is higher.

~ Debbie Macomber

There is no disappointment so numbing...as someone no better than you achieving more.

~ Joseph Heller

Heart-stopping envy is the sincerest form of flattery.

~ Anna Godbersen

To feel envy is human, to savour schadenfreude is devilish.

~ Arthur Schopenhauer

No bird ever looked at a plane in envy

~ Iain Thomas

A narcissist is someone better looking than you are.

~ Gore Vidal

I had some ambition. I meant everything to be different with me. I thought I had more strength and mastery. But the most terrible obstacles are such as nobody can see except oneself.

~ George Eliot

Even in those cities which seem to enjoy the blessings of peace, and where the arts florish, the inhabitants are devoured by envy, cares and anxieties, which are greater plagues than any expirienced in a town when it is under siege.

~ Voltaire

Some people suffer from the green-eyed monster called envy.

~ Ana Monnar

Some folks rail against other folks, because other folks have what some folks would be glad of.

~ Henry Fielding

The Number our envious Persons, confirmation our capability.

~ Oscar Wilde